Prairie-Chickens in Performance: The Drama of Spring Grouse Leks. By Jay Cooney

A Dusky Grouse in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. This hen was followed by her chicks, spring’s abundance in the high desert. Photo by the author.

As the glow of dawn illuminated a hill dappled with wispy sagebrush and a sizable elk herd, I received my first glimpse of a peculiar avian ritual. Through my spotting scope, I could make out the jagged halo of tail feathers belonging to a male Gunnison Sage-Grouse. On a distant ridge, a group of sage-grouse leapt and whirled in a striking exertion of energy for birds scratching out a living on the wind-blasted sagebrush steppe. Each spring in the Southern Rockies, various grouse species form unique courtship congregations called leks. Strutting males perform captivating, often bizarre displays to vie for the attention of inspecting females. The lek’s drama is alluring enough to inspire human pilgrimages; at the watchable wildlife area I visited, I met a group of birders road-tripping specifically to witness the dance of every one of America’s grouse species. The rhythmic performances of lekking grouse beckon spring’s renewal of life.

On the golden plains of eastern New Mexico, the Lesser Prairie-Chicken embodies bird courtship at its most flamboyant. From February through April, males gather at display grounds, often arena-like landscape features where leks have assembled for generations. As females arrive to assess potential mates, males stomp their feet rapidly while inflating the reddish-orange air sacs on their necks and raising feathers that look like rabbit ears. The droning sound of prairie-chickens booming and cackling resonates for a mile across the prairie. Males attempt to upstage one another, sparring and leaping up to ten feet in the air, resulting in a few select males being chosen for breeding by multiple females. Hens receive no material benefit of nesting territory or parental care, such that females must gauge preferable mates by their displays alone.

In these polygynous social arrangements, female mate choice is a powerful driver of bird evolution. Since foundational studies by Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have examined how birds’ elaborate courtship evolved in tandem with the preferences of choosy mates. This process of sexual selection seems to favor males whose conspicuous plumage and strenuous displays indicate that they are healthy enough to incur such costs without succumbing to predation, parasites, or disease. The genes underlying such health and vigor are thus conferred to offspring. Ornithologist Richard Prum suggests that a subjective sense of beauty is also at play, resulting in aesthetic mate choice driven by desire and pleasure, like that which compels human romance.

Lesser Prairie-Chicken populations are in a free-fall, having declined by 97% since the 1960s due to industrialization of the plains. This silencing of the prairie triggers an erosion of cultural identity: for Blackfeet people whose dances are inspired by the footwork of lekking males, and ranchers who recognize their heritage as contingent on the health of the whole land-community. In The Spell of the Sensuous, geophilosopher David Abram describes how, “As we drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages [and cultures] become increasingly impoverished and weightless.” To ensure a future graced by grouse leks is to preserve the same kind of enrapturing, romantic drama that stirs our own societies.

Jay Cooney is a Naturalist at Wild Birds Unlimited of Santa Fe